Question from amab

I'm sorry if this is not allowed, I'm not the typical audience of this sub, but perhaps your opinion might be helpful. I am AMAB who recently thought of myself as MTF. I was intensively figuring out if I am trans for the last 3 months. At moments I thought I knew with great certainty that I am trans and will transition into female, but now I see that it was just a phase. Just a stupid fetish, a fantasy. The final nail in the coffin was the sage test that told me I'm not actually femine but androgynous. :(

The discovery of transgender community this summer and realisation that transition is a possibility was almost like a point of no return for me. I can't just igore it and move on living as a guy without thoughts of what it would be if I transitioned. But yet it turns out I'm not "trans enough" whitch is sad for me.

I will have to learn to appreciate the life of a male, and who knows it better than you guys? What are some awesome things about being a guy?

The SAGE and COGIATI tests are, pardon my French, a load of horseshit. They pretty much evaluate whether you meet the criteria for Harry Benjamin Syndrome (which is long past outdated) and nothing else.

The fact that you feel disappointed at the possibility of not being trans is a flashing neon indicator that you're probably trans.

Look up the DSM-5 criteria for gender dysphoria. If two or more of those criteria describe you, no reputable therapist would tell you you're cis.

You sound like me from two years ago trying to convince myself that being FtM was “just a phase” and “I’m not not trans enough because [insert ridiculous reason here]”. Now I’m almost a year on t and I feel better about myself and my body than ever before.

After finding out that trans guys existed I could not get it out of my head. I was thinking about transition for hours at a time, every single day for 2.5 years. Kept thinking “this will pass. This is nothing. I just have to learn to live as a girl”. But that longing, that desire to transition, that curiosity of how much better I’d feel if I just took that leap of faith, that followed me. And it’s probably going to keep following you as well, until you do something about it.

No one can tell you that you are trans except yourself. YOU know who you are and what you want better than anyone else. No quiz or test is going to answer that for you. If you want to be a girl, if you spend long stretches of time fantatsizing about being a women and how much better your life would be if you were, then maybe those feelings need to be examined and taken into consideration.

Listing to you the benefits of being a guy will not make your feelings go away.

The awesome things about being a guy are only awesome if you actually are a guy, and it sounds like you might be a girl or non-binary! Those tests are completely arbitrary and YOU are the only one who can read your gender. Only girls want to be girls, and only guys want to be guys. And some non-binary people want to be both at the same time or different times or neither of them or some other combination. But if you don’t want to be a guy, you’re not a guy and you don’t have to live as one.

I wouldn’t give up on how you feel yet, friend. All of us, FTM and MTF, have felt not “trans enough.” There’s no “enough.” There’s no trans bar you have to reach to ride the roller coaster. You just are.

I went back and forth on whether or not I wanted to transition. I kept telling myself that I made it this far (I’m 28) living as female without any major issues, why transition? But then I knew I also deeply regretted all of the things I avoided because I wasn’t comfortable, and didn’t want that to continue for the rest of my life.

It’s okay to question. It’s okay to change your mind. But don’t let any test or any other person tell you how you feel. You are fully capable of determining for yourself what you want to do with your life and your body.

If you're a woman, you are a woman. There is no "enough", and nobody has the right to have the final say of whether they're trans or not but yourself. No test should discourage you if you truly feel like transitioning would benefit your life and give it a greater quality.

Do you have support for MTF transitioning?

If you really do and truly believe you are cis, feel free to reach out to me about my enjoyment with my HRT and experiences so far.

If you want to be female, I think you should go for it. There is no "not trans enough", it's not an exclusive club or anything (I'm sure a few people act like it is, but they are wrong).

You can also be female without being feminine. The reverse of this is something I struggled with - I'm a nerd, not too athletic, and also affected by a lifetime of getting funny looks when behaving too un-feminine and self-correcting to not do those things.

I'm friends with a trans girl who's hobby is collecting and dressing up in (men's) civil war uniform replicas. I used to know a nonbinary but feminine-leaning (amab) blogger who preferred to dress in baggy, androgynous clothes, and sometimes had to fight harder to be taken seriously as trans because of it. There are butch women, and some of them are trans. And as others are saying, tomboys are definitely a thing.

Maybe try thinking about what sort of woman or enbie you would enjoy being? One mental hurdle I had to get past was that my idea of a generic "man" doesn't have much in common with me, but we're all individual people, not averages. Maybe collect women's or enbie fashion pictures on Pinterest or Tumblr, see what asthetics appeal to you, and see if you can learn something about yourself from that.

(I'm nerdy, gay (somewhat stereotypically gay), and I have kind of a "soft" personality. Knowing that helps me feel more sure of myself.)

If I get this right, you felt like you had a direction to take yourself in, and now you are asking people walking the other way what's so great about standing still? We can't help you with that :) "it's a shame I'm not trans cause otherwise I could transition" is a pretty common thing for trans people to say, really

.... I did that test and it's the biggest pile of nonsense I've seen in a long time. It assumes you are androgynous when you don't spend your money on car parts or hair care haha wtf. I wouldn't worry about that one. Maybe you can try to find a decent therapist instead?

I’m so sorry that you seem kinda hurt and frustrated. My advice would be finding a therapist that specializes in lgbt+ people. I didn’t realize how much internalized transphobia I had towards myself. I would push off my physical transition because my family told me I would regret it. They told me over and over and showed me videos or people who had decided to stop transitioning. (As if this was proof of why I am not trans) I started to believe them. I really hope you can find yourself, regardless of whether you are trans or not. Good luck!

So you’ve had strong feelings about being trans, but a test told you to not bother. And now you’re asking a bunch of people who, despite being male, were barely if ever treated as such, what the perks of being male are?

Hey, I'm *never* "trans enough". I'm not super manly, I'm just a dude. And for literally ***decades*** I thought I was just weird, that every female felt this innate discomfort with being female and that little euphoria when gendered as male by strangers.

Fam, there's no such thing as "trans enough". We are all individuals, and experience things differently. One person's trans experience is going to be totally different from any other person's trans experience. If you feel like maybe you are trans, then you feel like maybe you are trans. Just because you experience something a little differently than what you hear/see of other trans women, doesn't mean you're "not as trans as they are". Trans isn't a "club"...there is no sign outside of a treehouse saying "no ___ allowed". Don't base you're own feelings about your own identity on the experiences of other people, or on what other people say they feel.

What is this sage test? Idk why I'm picturing like Naruto in sage mode popping up and being like "hmm you are not mtf". No one else can tell you how you feel. Only you can tell you how you feel. No one else is in your head, no one else is in your thoughts, no one can read your mind, know one knows what you're thinking...only you know these things. Is the sage test some like internet test? Like a buzzfeed quiz? What is it lol? If it's like a buzzfeed quiz sort of internet test things...boy have I got news for you! Those sorts of tests are all bs. They're put on the internet just for the sake of entertainment, they're meant to entertain people. They really shouldn't be taken seriously. Again...only you have the power to make decisions about yourself, and to have feelings about yourself...some internet quiz shouldn't have control over that.

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